muvluvfandomcom-20200223-history
Talk:Operation Ouka/@comment-26331553-20151206173516/@comment-4391208-20151210055302
I don't get your point. You bring up time issues and go to the trouble of comparing real-life battles involving humans on both sides that tire, need food, rest, and other necessities, and a fictional work with humanity in a more-or-less stable footing and a protected home base against their enemies, to ML, where the world is more or less a pile of shit sinking under its own weight. BETA recharge from a reactor and are constantly produced; the only time there is prep time against them is when a Hive population has yet to reach critical levels. Considering the frequency of culling operations, they far outstrip the replenishment of humanity's own numbers just by incubation period alone, and require neither a protracted growth time nor training period. The destruction of the Yokohama Reactor meant that the 00U's G-element-supported inner mechanisms could no longer recharge and purify, meaning that for every day delayed, the chances of no Susanoo left for the battle would continue to skyrocket. There was also no guarantee that they could fix the Susanoo under the time limit of both the now-defunct 19-day adaptation period or the 00U's remaining operational timespan, to say nothing of the strain on the 00 Unit of carrying out the mission itself. On the day of the assault the BETA created and deployed the Fort Laser at Evensk, a Phase 2 Hive, a Hive that wasn't even supposed to have Laser/Heavy Laser-classes (it did have them for that battle). A delay of even longer might have seen more of these appear, and were that to happen at, say, Lyons or Suez, the UK and Europe would go down at the same time while Africa finally gets overrun. One might offer the alternative deal that Kashgar was the manufacturing Hive and the Fort Laser walked to Evensk, but I find that highly unlikely if not outright impossible - the Fort Laser is pretty slow itself, and no BETA travels fast enough to cover that much distance What happens if the BETA had used the time to deploy a second unit at Evensk? The 00U had been leaking data for some time (post-17 Dec to count the earliest possible date), but it is also unknown for how long the BETA had been building the Fort Laser for. Two days later during the operation the Evensk Hive fielded both the Fort Laser and enough conventional BETA to stonewall the Soviet forces there. And this was at the Evensk Hive, which received all three operation points: Orbit bombing, artillery support from both land and sea, and the conventional forces present. At maximum, fourteen days. Fourteen days to create a new species of Laser capable of orbital interception. The nineteen-day adaptation was already gone by that time; the only reason AL shells worked at all was because the BETA didn't know that there were specialized shells and probably thought all human-made shells doubled as AL shells if shot. The human forces didn't have a choice the moment it was discovered in the aftermath of the Defense of Yokohama Base that the 00U had been unintentionally leaking human knowledge to the Superior every time it connected to the Yokohama Hive. This is one of the primary complaints some have with the original series, actually; they find that this string of bad-luck incidences too improbable to be believed. Every other technological example you've mentioned would have taken more than 2 days to develop, let alone develop and field. The humans were already on borrowed time, depending on how you see it, as far back as the 1999 Operation Lucifer. Them finding that out only at the ass end of 2001 did not help at all. Read ST: I hope you meant that as a joke, because the book may or may not exist in a world that had knowledge of and were aiming for peaceful, actual first contact with aliens (Viking-1 made contact with the BETA on Mars in 1958) then got their asses handed to them on a plate. That said, Kouki has cited the Starship Troopers novel as one of his sources of inspiration; the BETA are a mixed balance of the low-tech bugs in the movies and the high-tech ones in the novel, the various combat and pilot self-powered exoskeletons are taken from ST's powered armor, the ODs are the ML edition of the original novel troopers and there are music pieces in MLA that reference the ST movie OST. Even the orbital drop sequence is split into AL shells and orbital bombing taking the place of dummy shells, except that the ODs are launched in the second wave; and when your enemies fire lightspeed-like beams rather than wavy plasma putz, I think it's a fairly justified change to prevent the Lasers from simply hitting eveyrthing; they've done it every time and Operation Ouka was the only exception since they knew what AL shells were designed to do. Speaking of AL shells, let me say something else. Most people say "just switch to airburst" like it's actually doable in a month, let alone two days. No, it's not. ALS work by having the Lasers disintegrate the shells' heavy metal composite to create a metal-particulate mist that remains in the air, disrupting the targeting and the firing strength of the Laser-class. Because this remains close to the ground, it reduces Laser range. They are not tiny bits of shiny metal a shell flings out like sweets out of a broken pinata when shot at; the entire concept of AL shells depend on the Lasers firing on them to create those heavy metal particulates. It's doubtful that ML humanity possesses technology advanced enough to re-create that effect at any point of time during prior to 2002, and to create an airburst countermeasure would entail having to create an entirely new technology branch that can negate lasers (not counting the Rutherford Field, which as far is concerned is a one-off deal). I won't deny that the Operation was rushed and entailed frantic decisions (both in-universe and development in real-life; it would have helped to have a better representation of the other nations from a storytelling POV). Still, bad decisions? If those were made, they would have been made in the early years when they were formulating anti-Laser countermeasures, and in the early 1990s when they were ironing out orbital assault tactics. They had spent the better part of 3 decades fighting a war with what they presumed to be a massed but "dumb" enemy, and there was nothing to prove them wrong either until the Superior began observation in late 1990s and taking direct control of BETA strategic movement during the late-2001 era. By Ouka, there was no decision left to be made; bet everything on a glimmer of hope, or roll over and die.